Food & Drink

Best Fast-Food Mexican (and More)

Del Taco

(b) "No, I'm sorry, but I have a sensitive stomach and I'm only allowed to eat Mueslix with Lactaid."

(c) "Hell, yes!"

The answer is (c), for so many reasons.

First of all, taste that chicken soft taco. It's different, isn't it? Open it up and look inside; don't be afraid, now. See that white sauce? That's the secret sauce. It's not sour cream. It seems to have a mayonnaise base. "Mayonnaise on a taco?" you say. "I think not!" Well, just try it. Whatever the heck it is, it makes that chicken soft taco about 10 times better than the one at Taco Bell.

He will admit that the orange sauce in the new crispy chicken taco is ancho chile, though. This taco is a breaded chicken patty inside a soft shell, and it's also a good-tastin' menu item you won't find at the Bell.

Let's explicate the phenomenon of Del Taco:

1. Selection. Green sauce on a burrito? Quesadillas four ways? A 65-cent burrito? Really good crinkle-cut fries? Chili-cheese fries? A hamburger for the provincial? A hangover-fighting breakfast of tortilla clotted with egg, cheese, bacon and orange sauce of unknown origin? All foodstuffs you will find at Del Taco but not at Taco Bell.

2. Cheap-as-hell prices. At the Del, $5 will get you two meals, and $10 means a week's worth of lunches. With 39-cent tacos and similarly priced items, it's truly the cheapest of the cheap -- but it doesn't taste cheap, amigo.

3. All that and a sense of humor, too. Menu items include the Macho-Size Drink, Obscene Meal and Big Fat Tacos. If Del Taco had a mascot, he could match that Jack in the Box clown, snap for snap.

Hackbardt explains that the freedom to have fun with the food names and advertising comes from being an independent company with a fun and competitive drive.

"This is a private company, so we just have a real 'tude here," he says, "and we just want to have some fun with what we're doing. The chairman of the board of this company is from Brooklyn, and he's a stickball kid -- you know, from the streets -- and he just loves to compete and he's got an attitude, and it shows through the whole company. You don't see our commercials in St. Louis, but in our last set of television commercials, we filmed in front of Taco Bell headquarters, right on the street right in front. It's sort of a David-and-Goliath thing, and we're definitely the David part. My favorite story was like 1993 or something, and Taco Bell came out with a seven-layer burrito, and Kevin, our chairman of the board, just wasn't gonna stand for that, so we came out with an eight-layer burrito. It's like that movie with Al Capone, The Untouchables: 'You put one of my guys in the hospital, I'll put two of yours in the morgue.'"

That's cold, baby!

The Del Taco on Grand Boulevard near Highway 40, like all three Del Tacos in St. Louis, used to be a Naugles. Before that, the retro-space-age building with the saucer roof was a Sinclair filling station. (Insert gas joke here.)

Speaking of disturbing the peace, Hackbardt tells a scary story about a wacky Del Taco menu idea that never made it out of the test kitchen:

"The triple-meat sandwich. We decided not to go with it -- it tastes pretty darn good, though. But it's just too much for people to comprehend. It's a burger patty, steak and taco meat all in a hamburger bun, with cheese and bacon. That's a lot of meat, and it was really good. It tasted like all the good meat that anybody who likes meat likes. But it was just too repulsive for most people to think about."